eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

December 2014

12/29/2014

George Ripley provided as good he definition of Transcendentalism has any in the movement ever wrote, says Gura.

“There is a class of persons who desire a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called transcendentalist, – because they believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external senses. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter. Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not depend on tradition, or on historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul. There is an inner light, they believe, which enlightens every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all, the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure, to perceive spiritual truth, when distinctly repented; and the ultimate appeal, on all moral questions, is not to a jury of scholars, or a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the race."

I think of Transcendentalism as a mechanism for transforming religious people into secular people via spirituality. It keeps the awe without the object, you might say, asserting that one can feel connected without there necessarily being a rational logical exchange of words involved (though words certainly can be involved). The secret was to keep experiencing life as a child, directly, without a mediated “supplied” response. The true lover of nature, Emerson claims, "is he who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood."

“There was no central creed that signaled membership in the transcendentalist coterie,” Gura writes,

“nor any roll that certifiably recorded participants. Definitions and boundaries are further vexed but the fact that, as with the word 'Puritan' in 17th-century England, at first the movement's detractors most commonly used 'Transcendentalism' as an epithet.”

It seems to have been an intellectual movement in which “joiners” shared antipathies more than common understandings. It was a movement that argued that truth existed below doctrines and sacred texts were too shallow to contain it. One of the clubs original members the Rev. James Freeman Clark, a Unitarian Clergyman, wrote that Transcendentalists called themselves 'the club of the like-minded,' primarily because no two thought alike.

Simply put, Charles mayo Ellis said, “transcendentalism maintains that man has ideas, that come not through the five senses, or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his imminent presence in the spiritual world.”

Lacking any common textual or institutional authority was both an advantage and a disadvantage to the transcendentalist community because thus really only allowed certain gifted people to “belong.” One can imagine anyone, mechanics, distillers, and slaves being Christians but one suspects that you had to be an Emerson, a Thoreau, a Fuller, or a Theodore Parker to be a Transcendentalist. You had to be able to look deep within and articulate what you saw and felt there. You had to have your high beams on pretty high it would seem to be a Transcendentalist.

The core beliefs ofTranscendentalism would have challenged both the materialists who would argue that as material beings we are meant to pursue happiness by maintaining close contact with material things that make us happy. They would have also challenged the mainline denominations who argued that the pursuit of happiness was to be found in maintaining connections between the soul and some ancient theologian’s definition of God.

Gura quotes one 19th century interpreter of the Transcendentalist ideology in the following words:

“I think Innately present in each individual, in other words, is a spiritual principle that, of itself, without any external stimuli, allows one to distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, God and Satan, and it supersedes any outward laws or injunctions. Transcendentalism is thus predicated on the reality of the spiritual or religious element in man; his inborn capacity to perceive truth and right, so that moral and religious truth can be proved to him with the same degree of certainty that attends all material demonstrations."

One defender of the movement called it “spontaneous reason” – that is reason that does not need to demonstrate any visible verifiable process. Proof was not to be “discovered” but felt when the hearer or reader heard it. “Thus, to know the realm of the Spirit, men do not need any explanation or confirmation from teachers or books,” says Gura, “Rather, they have only to listen to ‘the teachings of their own souls, the light that shines within them.”

Gura notes that Transcendentalism was somewhat introduced by a Vermonter by the name of James Marsh who was looking for a way of seeing the world that would allow one to be both and enlightened mind (something that the Enlightenment was offering) and a soul on fire (something that the second Great Awakening revivalists were offering). Gura writes:

“In his attempts to bridge the divide between rational religion, championed by the Unitarians, and an affective faith with its emphasis on personal spiritual experience, advocated by Trinitarian's who led the so-called Second Great Awakening of these years, Marsh embraced a new understanding of religious experience . . . “

He notes that many of the early adhenents to Transcendentalist ideas were getting them from Germany.

“Ridley most appreciated two of Herders ideas. First, religion had to be understood apart from theology, for it was "a matter of the inward nature, the higher consciousness of man." Theology, on the other hand, was a set of propositions "for and against which we may dispute" and should never be confounded with religion, verified as it was not by logic but by internal spiritual principles. Second, Herder insisted that men should not "rest the divine authority of Christianity upon the evidence of miracles," for Christ had never claimed that they should be the criterion of his truth nor compared to the value of his "moral endowments." A miracle may direct attention to Doctrine but could never prove its truth, which came only through conviction of the understanding.”

Ripley deemed it an error "to rest a system of spiritual truth, addressed to the soul, upon the evidence of miracles addressed to the senses" Gura asserts.

One might argue that the Enlightenment had destroyed people’s ability to wonder at anything. And without something to wonder at, life became dull and uninteresting and purposeless. Orestes Brownson noted that Unitarianism had "demolished" Calvinism, "and made an end in all thinking minds of everything like dogmatic Protestantism." But now Unitarianism satisfied nobody. "It is negative, cold, lifeless," he continued, "and all advanced minds among them are dissatisfied with it, and are craving something higher, better, more living and life-giving." It was into this vacuum that a whole variety of new religions and expressions of Transcendentalism stepped.

Emerson tried to give you a shot of wonder by lecturing on thought provoking topics. Thoreau encouraged you to return to nature. Ripley set up a commune in which to join with others in learning and connecting. Alcott created a school where children could ask questions, journal, and be introspective together. Fuller started a book discussion group. Elizabeth Peabody started a book store. Theodore Parker started a church. They left the community of those who said “This God of the Bible is awesome” and set up a host of alternatives to awe as could be found in the world as they experienced it. IT certainly must have felt liberating to them as this new sense of awe did not come with a thick layer of moral codes. Transcendentalism “freed” them from restraints that had deeply constrained the New England mind and life for centuries (no doubt this was why the new ideas came out of the very heart of the source of that Puritan mind (Boston). It was "as the advocate of the rights of the mind," Orestes Brownson concluded, "as the defender of personal independence in the spiritual world" that Emerson won the accolades of "many young, ardent, and yet noble minds."

Emerson insisted that what was needed was not more memorizing but more seeing. More experiencing. According to Gura, in his Divinity School Address, he

“excoriated the contemporary clergy for their inability to preach from their own personal experiences. He recounted his own disappointment in a local minister who at sorely tempted him to stop attending services.

Sadly, this clergyman had never spoken "one word that intimated that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined." He had failed dismally at "the capital secret of his profession," to convert "life into truth."

“How could the graduating students avoid similar failure?” asks Gura,

“Go alone, Emerson directed them, and "refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men." "Dare to love God without mediator or Veil." "Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost," he proclaimed, "cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with deity." By trusting their own hearts, the young men would win the respect of their congregations and have the courage to stand up for social justice. Emerson told the young clergyman to recover true, rather than historical, Christianity. He looked, thoughts, for "the new teacher ..."

For their part, the Divinity school faculty felt that he had thrown down the gauntlet.”

For many Transcendentalists however, there was a cost to this freedom; A certain rootlessness … and perhaps even a shared difficulty in forming communion.

As Noah Porter wrote, of Orestes Brownson he was "manifestly and avowedly in a state of continual transition, – in a certain condition of perpetually becoming, but of never being.” How does one form community when you know longer know just what you think or where who you are can change with the day’s feelings about life?

Critics of Emerson’s Divinity School Address focused on the hubris of the Transcendentalist claims. For them, it devalued scholarship and academic rigor, the tried and true path to wisdom from their perspective was not bellybutton watching but language learning and book reading.

“What most exercised [Andrews Norton] and other conservative Unitarians about Schleiermacher's belief in the primacy of internal religious feeling was that it discounted – indeed, made it relevant – the education and scholarship to which scriptural exegetes had dedicated their lives. ... Did not say but deeply believed that the insurgents sought nothing less than to make his scholarship, and so him, irrelevant.”

“In Parker's view, even if one proved that Jesus had never lived, Christianity still would exist because of its inherent truth. Christ was simply the Son of Man, as we are; and the son of God, like ourselves. In him heaven has come down to earth, or rather, earth has become heaven. Christ's beauty and the mystery of Christ thus lay in the message that he was all that we can be, when we live as he did."

Can a world sustain such an ideology for long? How long will it be before you get a John Brown who expresses his unique moral sense with a broadsword? Only later, Gura writes, “as they discovered the social implications of their acknowledgment of "spontaneous reason" did they realize that they were prophets of a wholly new secular as well as spiritual order.” If one was entitled to challenge religious doctrines centuries old, why not secular laws only weeks or months old? It is no accident that Transcendentalism’s great iconoclast, Henry David Thoreau, was also its most articulate law-breaker (Fugitive Slave law defier).

Elizabeth Peabody has another word for it, "ego theism", which she used in characterizing her disappointment in the tendency of much transcendentalist thought. The problem with viewing the world as Emerson did was that people deified their own conceptions; that is, they say that their conception of God is all that men can ever know of God.

Still, it is difficult not to appreciate the message of the Transcendentalists that we lose much when we focus low in life. “The eyes of the north are full of cotton,” Theodore Parker told his audience when discussing their inability to see the moral implications of an economy rooted in slavery,

“they see nothing else, for a web is before them; their ears are full of cotton, And they hear nothing but the buzz of their Mills; their mouth is full of cotton, and they can speak audibly but two words – Tariffs , Tariffs , dividends, dividends."

His message was not altogether unlike that of the great Puritan ministers who preceeded him in Boston churches. People no doubt came to hear him speak because it was more like hearing Jerimiah or Isiah or Amon than it was hearing a sermon about them. In one of two speeches before the American anti-slavery society in New York on May 7, 1856, an event at which Garrison introduced him as a very excellent fanatic, a very good infidel, and a first-rate traitor, Parker spoke on "the present crisis in American affairs." He was not an expositor of prophecies but a prophet. He did not believe in transmuted or tertiary messages from God it seems. But then again, neither did John Brown

In the course of this book, you learn about the various sources, causes, and expressions of transcendentalism. I think I liked his explanation of Margerett Fuller the most.

“Let them be sea captains,” she said of women’s place in society. Why should anyone be restricted to any particular calling?

“What a woman needed,” she suggested in her most famous essay, “Women in the Nineteenth Century,

“was not to rule but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul, to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her. Instead, all around her Fuller saw women content as objects of masculine desire and confined to a domestic sphere in marriages that provided no opportunity for the independence in which she herself had been nurtured.”

“Psychologically, to Fuller, Europe was like a strong, healthy tonic. Had I only come 10 years earlier, she lamented to her friend Caroline Sturgis, for now my life must ever be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on obstructions which only came because I was not in the soil most fitted to my nature.”

I wonder how many of us ever find “the soil fitted to our natures”?

Eventually, Transcendentalism would be buried in the chaos of the abolition movement and Civil War. “The last year has forced us all into politics,” said Emerson of the Fugitive Slave Law. Who could lecture on the need for individual freedom while four million black people worked in utter tyranny?

This would make a delightful textbook in a class on Transcendentalism (would anyone ever sign up for such a thing?)

Question for Comment: Some people see Emerson and the Transcendentalists as a liberating force in American intellectual and social life – Like Moses bringing people out of Egypt. Others would see the Transcendentalist movement as a re-emergence of the oft repeated and dreaded phrase in the book of Judges, “And every man did what was right in their own eyes.” Must freedom always lead to catastrophe in human communities?

12/27/2014

The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War: 1848 to 1861. Reading this book is a bit like watching a major suspension bridge with thousands of cars on it collapse in slow motion. (See here for example). Because you are looking back on the process in hindsight, you know what is coming but few of the people in the disaster seem to see it about to happen. Potter meticulously revisits each of the significant moments where a cable breaks or is worn thin by the rust of sectional tension. At every point, we see men scurrying to repair the damage but each time the damage seems to go deeper, the repair seems to take longer and be less effective, and the will to invest effort in healing a subsequent wound to the sentiment of union dissipates. Still, I was struck by how tenacious the meme of unionism held on in the face of what proved to be insurmountable differences.

As someone who has taught US History for well over a dozen years, the trail through this period of time was familiar, but walking it with the insights and research of an accomplished Yale History professor made it feel like a “road not taken” before. At every point, details were illuminated that I had never noticed or considered before. One senses that the union was made up of cables which were made up of braided bands of individual steel wires and that in the process of secession that taking place in the thirteen years between the proposal of the Wilmott Proviso and Fort Sumter, there were tens of thousands of individual snapped “impending crisis” points that led to the collapse in the end.

David Wilmott, some would argue, put the tension on the first wire that began the process. “God forbid that we should be the means of planting this institution [slavery] upon it,” he said, referring to the slavery-free lands of Mexico. His Proviso to the bill that would initiate the purchase of that land would forever ban the practice of slave holding in the American West. “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory …” Those were the words that began the process of unzipping the union. All of a sudden, political parties that had been arraigned against one another began the process of reformatting themselves into regional alliances. Immediately, those who saw the danger began applying procedural remedies to keep the bill from having this obvious effect but they would be simply the first of many insufficient remedies to be applied in the decade and a half to come. In the end, they all amounted to band-aids on broken limbs as though tumors were blisters.

With the Presidency of James Polk we begin to see a series of leaders elected to serve the nation who persistently hedged their influences towards the South when they felt that they could do so. Polk rode into office promising expansion for the South (Texas) and expansion for the North (Oregon). But when it came time to actually spend money to achieve those goals, he cowboyed up for Texas-plus-a-lot (“Huzzah! For slavery!”) in exchange for half of Oregon (“Tough luck Free-Soilers.”) Voters coming of age in the years of Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan were accustomed to seeing presidents who knew where which side of their southern bread their southern butter was spread (thanks to the three-fifths compromise). This was an age when candidates had to run for office by campaigning in every state and it was an age when newspapers could now begin effectively embarrassing you if you tried to “package” yourself to different regional consistencies. Michan Presidential candidate, Lewis Cass for example, printed a campaign pamphlet for the South and another for the North. It took a little while for Presidents to understand this sensibly enough to realize that it was impossible to “double-promise” to get elected. (Although, truth be told, it now seems that modern Presidents have learned that you can get caught double promising and still get elected).

Rather than outline the whole book, which really deserves to be read, I think I may just highlight a few of my thoughts about sections from each chapter.

Chapter Two: Portents of a Sectional Rift

“While slavery was sectional,” says Potter, “Negrophibia was national.” This seems to me at the heart of why the Civil War was fought. It was fought because both sides were wrong and when both sides are wrong in a conflict, so long as both sides focus on why the other side is wrong, they will both have justification for warring against a wrong side. Even the hero of the above story, David Wilmott, was arguing for a “black free” West; not simply a slave-free West. “Free Soil” was not just a slogan to keep slaves out. It was a slogan to keep free blacks out as well.

“Open discussion of slavery became a taboo,” writes Potter, “and the South established what has been called an ‘intellectual blockade.’” This always seems to me to be a dangerous place for humans to place themselves in. A meme is an idea that seeks to evolve, survive, and replicate itself. Jacques Monod, the French biologist that won the Nobel prize for his work on RNA in the early 1960’s described a meme quite well when he wrote,

“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

In the South, the meme of white supremacy became an idea that refused to evolve, or even be challenged. It desired rather to shut itself off from challenges, I suspect largely because the idea itself knew that it could not survive those challenges.

Potter notes that both North and South had to compartmentalize themselves to make their “marriage” work with one another. In a sense, both were able to accept short term compromises to their controlling beliefs by asserting that they would undo those compromises at some future date (the alcoholic saying “I will only allow myself to drink two beers now because I am promising to drink none tomorrow). One might argue that the South allowed itself to surrender real and specific privileges regarding their idea of slaves-as-property (their essential meme) in the belief that someday, they would be allowed to carry their slaves throughout the continent. Someday, they no doubt reasoned to themselves, “those God-soaked Puritans in New England will wake up and realize that their God actually wants to make their lives easier by the use of slaves.” Similarly, Abraham Lincoln could plug his nose and promise to maintain slavery where it was so long as he was not asked to give up the ultimate vision of having no slaves anywhere.

Both North and South borrowed heavily from their hopes to pay for their present accommodations, perhaps unaware of just how deeply in dream-debt both they and their counterparts were getting in the process.

This is why the Wilmott Proviso was so destabilizing. It made it impossible henceforth to disguise what had been going on here-to-for. Both sides realized that the only way they were managing to co-exist, was to take out mortgages on the future and the future could only pay one of them. Slavery suddenly appeared as an insurmountable obstacle to union. “You could not look upon the table but there were frogs,” Said Missouri Senator Thomas Benton, comparing the slavery issue to the Biblical plague in Egypt.

“You could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were not frogs!”

Chapter Three: Forging the Territorial Shears

“More often than not,” Potter writes, “Sectional disagreements were adjourned rather than reconciled.” One could always seem to find a remarkably effective short term solution if one was willing to compromise rationality and logic and foresight. This seems almost to be the theme of the entire book. Americans threw their very best minds to the task of finding a resolution to this conflict but the best that they were ever able to do amounted to a procrastination of armed conflict. Ultimately there were variations on six main positions. First, was to declare slaves property and slavery a moral good and consequently reopen the international slave trade and expand American borders into Mexico and Cuba to benefit more from it. Second, was to allow slavery everywhere as though slaves were property but treat the tradition of banning the slave trade with respect (Chief Justice Taney perhaps). Third, was to allow slavery everywhere except in the States where it had already been banned (Calhoun). Fourthly, was to allow or ban slavery in whatever locations wanted it or did not want it, whether territory or state (Popular Sovereignty). Fifth, was to protect it where it existed and prohibit it from spreading anywhere that it did not already exist while working towards legal, perhaps compensated emancipation (Lincoln and the Republicans). Sixth, was to demand immediate emancipation of all American slaves, refuse to support any union with slavery in it, and let the South go if they chose (Garrison). Seventh, was to take violent measures to maintain the union without slaves anywhere. Between each of these positions were positions but those were the main ones.

Potter highlights two logical problems with the notion of Popular Sovereignty. The devil, as it were, was in the details. It was one thing to assert that territories could determine if they wanted slavery or not but it was another to determine WHEN they could determine this. Assume for a moment that there was only one settler in Kansas. Could that one settler determine that Kansas would have no slaves? What if that settler’s wife disagreed? Did it require three settlers to make that determination? Eighteen? A hundred thousand? Was the right to decide implicit from the moment the first settler arrived? Or only after settlers with and without slaves reached a certain number? Popular Sovereignty was an answer in the abstract. It was not an answer to the real situation on the ground.

The chapter also highlights the question of Constitutional powers. Had the Constitution delegated the authority to Congress to ban slavery in territories? If it had, was the Missouri Compromise even Constitutional? If Congress had that power, could it delegate that power to a territory? If it did not, could a territory assume it as though it were a state? And when? Did the Constitution answer these questions and if it did, was it to be regarded as more important than the labor needs and moral sensibilities of living people?

“The dialectic of the crisis of 1860 had been articulated by December of 1847,” says Potter, “The shears continued to cut deeper and deeper.”

Chapter Four: The Deadlock of 1846-1850

“Congress was beginning to lose its character as a meeting place for working out problems and to become a cockpit in which rival groups could match their best fighters against one another.”

Mmm … that sounds familiar.

Would a person with slaves buy property in a territory if they did not know if that territory might or might not allow slavery within a year or two? Would someone today build a factory in a state that might or might not have electricity, internet, or phone service in a year or two? Clearly, they would be taking a risk. It is understandable that John C. Calhoun saw the need for guarantees that would negate Douglas’ doctrine of popular sovereignty. It seems clear that the time for saying “We will figure this out next year” was over; which is why it amazes me that they were able to keep the union together as long as they did.

Potter writes: “Any formula ambiguous enough to excite hope on both sides was also capable of arousing fear on both.”

Ambiguous (adj) “unclear or inexact because a choice between alternatives has not been made.”

What was the choice? It seems clear that the choice had to do with the humanity and potential of the African race. Could they or would they, if given the opportunity and support, “rise” to the level of capability that white Americans had with that same opportunity and support. The reason for all the conflict, it seems to me, derives from the fact that neither the North or the Southhad given them that opportunity and support. It left the debate to be settled by recourse to existing “evidence” of what Africans could do without opportunity or support. The two sides were having an argument about whether a seed would grow into a pumpkin or a coconut tree while neither side was willing to plant it. It is no wonder that they could not agree for nowhere had they allowed the black person to demonstrate what he or she could actually do.

Chapter Five: The Armistice of 1850

Armistice (noun): an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting for a certain time; a truce.

I think the central message of this chapter is that the “Compromise of 1850” was essentially a paper-clip and duct tape affair that had little chance of surviving the demands that a fast growing country was about to place on the sectional controversy.

In the debate over what should be done with the territories of the Mexican Cession, what seems to appear is a certain willingness on the part of the South to surrender the ability to bring slaves to a territory in exchange for a symbolic agreement that they had a right to. One gets the feeling that the North was filling up with actual immigrants (mostly from Ireland) that needed land to go to faster than the South was filling up with actual slaves that needed plantations to go to. The South began fighting for rights to land in the future while the North was fighting for rights to land needed right now. This strikes me as somewhat similar to what had happened to cause the French and Indian War a hundred years earlier.

Potter refers to John C. Calhoun as “The most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost.” I need to read a biography of that guy - One coming in the mail soon.

It is interesting to look at the two different approaches to finding compromise used by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas. Clay attempted to bring all the different issues together into one bill so that everyone would have to give up something in order to get something. It failed largely because everyone had some things that they could surrender and some things that they could not surrender. Everyone had some things that they wanted to have and some things that they had to have. Putting all those things into one piece of legislation made it impossible to vote for all at once because every Congressman’s situation was different. Douglas thus broke the compromises up into sub-units with paired constituencies and had everyone vote on those paired compromises one at a time. Each had its own different set of proponents and thus he effectively “gerrymandered” the entire bill by breaking it into palatable “small bites” of “must-haves” and “wont-haves” and “would likes” and “prefer-nots.”

Potter calls Douglas’ legislative feat “rare parliamentary virtuosity” but he says that the results amount to a truce, not a compromise. North and South were completely at odds throughout every measure. Douglas simply found enough soft tissue between the two sides to give the different immovable blocks electoral support at different points. And, at the crucial point, the compromise promised “non-intervention” of the Federal Government which could be taken to mean that it would not stop a territory from banning slavery or that it would not stop a territory from approving it. Both sides could take it “their way” and thus kick the can down the road another electoral cycle. As Salmon P. Chase began saying, “The question of slavery in the territories has been avoided. It has not been settled.”

Chapter Six: Fire-Eaters, Fugitives, and Finality

Clearly, the Compromise was already on the ropes when Stephen Douglas proposed opening up Kansas and Nebraska territory to popular sovereignty. The central irritant had been the Fugitive Slave Law portion of the Compromise of 1850. Potter calls it, “a firebrand vastly more inflammatory than the Wilmott Proviso.” How, we ask ourselves in hindsight, did people think that the North was going to accept the role of deputy slave catcher for the South when at the time of the compromise they were actively helping them to escape? The Compromise of 1850 was already tottering when Douglas proposed giving it a shove and rebuilding something else.

Northerners were already deep into nullification territory when they began resisting all attempts at enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law and every time they violated it, they were putting a nail in the coffin of any effective counter-argument to Southern secession (not saying that this changes the rectitude of their decision to do so.)

Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) seems like an important case I had not come across before. A fugitive slave living in Pennsylvania (though she had been unofficially freed) was kidnapped and taken back to Maryland. Pennsylvania had a law that made this a crime. The Supreme Court over-ruled the Pennsylvania law but indicated that the State had no obligation to use its resources to recapture slaves that Federal law required returned. In essence, the decision seemed to suggest that if the Federal government wanted to pass a law that required the return of slaves, the Federal government would have to enforce its own law with its own law enforcement agencies. (This was a world, unlike our own, of no “unfunded mandates.”) Personal Liberty laws were thus enacted all over the North forbidding State officials from helping recover fugitive slaves.

If this decision applied to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, it is easy to see that you would eventually have had to create an army of Federal law enforcement agents (we can only surmise that only Southerners would have taken these jobs) to “invade” the North every time a slave escaped there. The end result is that Abraham Lincoln, had he been forced to keep his promises, would soon have found himself “invading the North” and starting a Civil War there instead of in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Polk, he would have been forced to reveal his not-altogether-unbiased hand towards one side or the other.

By the time that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851 (serial form) and 1852 (book form), the nation was heading in two different directions. “Without embracing secession, the South had committed itself to the principle of secession,” says Potter. “Without embracing abolition, the North had committed itself to the principle of abolitionism.”

Chapter Seven: A Railroad Promotion and Its Sequel

Immediately after the Compromise of 1850 was voted on, its adherents began trying to assert that it was a final solution to the slavery issue. Similarly, immediate controversies erupted over interpretation. And then people began flocking to California by the thousands and it became necessary to connect them to the Eastern half of the continent through a railroad which had to be built somewhere (North – via Chicago, South from New Orleans, or in the Middle starting in St. Louis). The political career and personal financial interests of Stephen Douglas all of a sudden collided to make him undo the flimsy compromise he had just worked to construct. A railroad to the Pacific was needed. Everyone agreed on that. A railroad through Chicago would secure to Illinois and the City of Chicago a boon that would benefit both it and the entire Northern cause of western settlement. Everyone agreed on that. The nation should pony up the money to build that road. No one in the South could accept that if that railroad was not willing to move a Southern man with his slaves into that Western territory. An applied Missouri Compromise line would be a deal breaker for a Northern railroad. Enter Stephen Douglas.

Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Bill was nothing if not an opening of a can of worms – or snakes (but it appears, he had real estate investments in lands west of Chicago and Presidential ambitions that would benefit from appearing to do something great for both the north and the South.)

Potter stands amazed at what Stephen Douglas thought that he could pull off (perhaps an over-inflated ego was the price America paid for his earlier success in negotiating the compromise?) Very quickly, what started out as a “railroad question” became a “slavery question” and the country was deep into debate just four short years after nailing the slavery question into a coffin from which it was never supposed to rise.

What seems obvious to me is just how flexible principles are. When a change in outcomes is desired, principles can be pliable and thus we begin to see outright reversals on process convictions when result commitments change. All of a sudden, a Missouri Compromise line that Northerners never liked in the first place, and would have loved to have seen moved hundreds of miles south became “sacred” – a line that Jesus may have well placed there to divide heaven and hell. Stephen Douglas put Congress in a rhetorical headlock and argued them into passing it and thereby unhinged the tottering structure of union as effectively as he had patched it together four years earlier. “Few events have swung American history away from its charted course,” writes Potter, “so suddenly or so sharply as Kansas-Nebraska.”

What is really interesting to me is something that Potter first infers in this chapter. Parties that began the 1850s only slightly pro or anti-slavery could not help the inexorable pull to their original slight leans. As they began to lean towards slavery, they began to lose their anti-slavery ballast and inadvertently began tipping ever more towards sectional policies and candidates. These parties were like boats that eventually find themselves tipping over in the direction that they first allow themselves to lean. Once they started favoring one side or the other, an inevitable feedback loop of support and resistance turned them into sectional parties.

Chapter Eight: The Ebb Tide of Manifest Destiny

This chapter deals with the way that American expansionism was impacted by the slavery conflict in the United States and how the fear of obtaining slave territory may have saved Cuba and parts of Northern Mexico from becoming involuntary States (like Hawaii would a few decades later).

What seems to me to be the high tide of American imperialism (until Theodore Roosevelt) was expressed in the Ostend Manifesto, a diplomatic memo, never intended to be made public, that declared American intentions altogether too undiplomatically.

“We should, however, be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo (Haiti), with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union."

The Manifesto suggested buying Cuba from a cash-strapped Spain and failing that to, as had been the procedure in Mexico, start a war and take it. The Ostend Manifesto was, you might say, a Bush Doctrine for slave insurrections. If slave insurrections were the mid-nineteenth century version of terrorist attacks, the argument employed was simply to pre-empt - to deny a potential insurrection sanctuary by possessing the land on which it might occur.

The very publishing of the document seems to have killed the intention of it. Manifest Destiny (aggressive expansionism) receded into the background at least until after the Civil War generation had suffered, bled, and begun to die off so that newer younger war mongers could arise to declare such policies both manly and American.

“The doctrine of manifest destiny, with its purpose of spreading American democratic institutions under the American flag was widely regarded as respectable,” writes Potter, “until the Ostend Manifesto linked it with naked aggression.” – and naked racist aggression to boot we might add. “The Ostend Manifesto gave the coup de grace to expansionism – at least until 1898.”

Chapter Nine: Two Wars in Kansas

This chapter reminds me that the people who form policy rarely actually think about what sort of decisions their policies will inspire and that will serve to completely overturn their intentions. Stephen Douglas, it appears, assumed that people would move to the territories after the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the same way that they had moved to territories in the past before. He was soon to discover he was wrong about that. A month before the Act had even passed, Eli Thayer had applied for a charter from the State of Massachusetts for an Immigrant Aid Society that would help transport Free-Soilers there.

As soon as slaveholders in the State of Missouri were made aware that the Northern States were going to “stock the pond” with anti-slavery fish, they saw it as their moral right to take all legal means to deny them of their goals. Conveniently, the laws of the territory merely required a person to be a “resident” of Kansas to vote on the Kansas disposition towards slavery and for a jug of whiskey and a free ride into Missouri, they could take a day or two off to go vote there as easily as any Yankee could move his whole family there.

This chapter details the process by which Kansas descended into bedlam. Ironically, Potter notes, the pro-slavery forces would have won in the original vote even if they had not cheated. But by cheating, they compromised the vote and gave Northerners the time they needed to immigrate and the excuse they needed to hold a revote. It also gave those Northerners time to arm themselves with shipments of Sharps rifles as Kansas turned into what I like to call “Kansastan.”

Potter’s analysis of the internal contradictions of John Brown are thought provoking. He describes him as a man of towering insurmountable ideals shackled to the corpse of a person ill equipped to achieve even basic functional life-skills. In a way, it is interesting that U.S. Grant was a similar failure in all things short of super-human. It’s just that U.S. Grant had the financial backing of the U.S. Government. More on John Brown in a future chapter.

Potter writes, “For purposes of what took place in the nation, it is possibly less important to know what happened in Kansas than to know what the American public thought was happening in Kansas.” Almost 25 years ago now, I began working on my Master’s thesis on American impressions and perceptions of Islam in the same time period as this. For some reason, this subject of how our lives are profoundly impacted by perceptions as much if not more than they are by actualities intrigues me. It makes you ask yourself more than you would like to “How is this act being perceived?” whenever you ask yourself “what am I doing?”

Potter discusses the newspapers of the day and their tendency to provide palpable yet successful “distortions of the evidence.” It is his opinion that Northern advantages in the ability to fund and distribute news favoring their side began to put a significant distance between the two competing memes as they geared up for full scale war. There is an NEH workshop in Worcester Massachusetts next summer that focuses on the growth of newspaper influence before the Civil War. I think I may apply for it. It seems like such a rich subject.

Chapter 10: The Political Parties in Metamorphosis

Irish Catholics of New York voted Democratic 95% to 5%. The flood of immigrants in the 1840’s overwhelmed the Northern Whigs and provided the Democratic Party with the replacement votes that they needed for Northern anti-slavery defections. Eventually, the Republicans with their Homestead Act promising 160 acres of land on the prairies would begin to win some of these people over by 1860 (Potter notes that 160 acres was strategically enough to farm but not enough to start a plantation you could live on).

Abraham Lincoln seems to have seen the Know-Nothing party’s political foolishness in throwing away men and their votes as he noted in 1855,

“I am not a Know-Nothing. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid, as a nation we began by declaring "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Chapter Eleven: Dred Scott and the Law of the Land

I learned some things about the Dred Scott case that I had not realized before. First, the lower court decision that Dred Scott was challenging involved the question of slaves taken to free states and what effect the transportation into a free state had on an enslaved man. The lower court had ruled that Scott had a right to sue his master’s heirs but they had also ruled that he was still a slave. Thus, when Scott appealed the decision, the case before the court was not whether or not he had a right to sue. Thus, the Supreme Court decision ruling that he, as a black man, was not citizen enough to sue in a Federal court was really “off the point.” The court was, if this is making any sense, ruling on a question not presented to it. It is this fact that would give many abolitionists cover for disregarding the decision as “nullifiable” (I invented that word).

The case was more logically complicated than I had previously understood. The Supreme Court had to decide what the question it was addressing was. Ultimately, Scott’s assertion that he should have been freed when he arrived in a free State assumed that the Missouri compromise line that made slavery illegal above a certain latitude was a constitutional Act of Congress. If it was, then Scott would have become a citizen when he stepped on free soil. The Court was simply going to declare him not a citizen and leave it at that … but then two Northern anti-slavery justices on the court threatened to make the case in their dissent that Scott’s freedom was unjustly taken away from him by the Southern dominated court. Their arguments would have embarrassed the court and thus, Taney decided to make his case in writing as well and thus, he was forced into declaring what he might have later regretted saying. President Buchanan had asked the court for a decision that could be used as political cover for a pro-slavery policy and Taney gave it to him. It fell on abolitionist ears like a ton of bricks.

In the Northern reaction to the Dred Scott decision, one hears the metallic snapping of another bond of the Union, a willingness to trust the judicial branch to be impartial. Comparing the majority decision with the dissenting opinion demonstrates how even at the highest levels of American logic, the country was divided. Justice Taney argued that since nowhere in the country were blacks given all the rights of whites, they were regarded as citizens nowhere. Justice Curtis countered that since some free blacks had always been granted some rights in some states from the very beginning, they always had been citizens. Black people, it seemed, existed, like human embryos, half-way between things and people.

*The New York Tribune asserted that Justice Curtis’ dissent “ground up the very bones” of Chief Justice Taney’s argument.

It became fashionable in anti-slavery circles to insist that the Court had decided a case not brought to it and that its opinions about the citizenship of free blacks was thus a matter of Taney’s personal opinion and not a legally binding decision of the court. But in the South, the decision would provide high octane fuel for a coming fight to make slavery a right everywhere except maybe New England (for the time being). Dred Scott served to give the South an entitlement that they would only relinquish at Appomattox Courthouse after 600,000 men had been killed fighting over it. The Dred Scott decision did not calm the waters of controversy. To the contrary, it emboldened the radicals on either side to shut down all communications with moderation.

Potter’s critique of the Dred Scott decision is insightful. He argues that the framers of the Constitution had seen slavery as a local – and they believed temporary - institution. “But always they regarded slavery as having a local sanction and freedom as having a national sanction.” By the time of the Dred Scott case, the South had come “to see freedom as having local sanction and slavery as having national sanction.” That is, the right to own and exploit slave labor was to be regarded as an American default. The ability to ban the use of the same was seen as an exceptional prerogative that would hopefully someday be rescinded.

Chapter Twelve: Lecompton: The Decent Grows Steeper

This chapter returns us to Kansastan and helps us to better understand how it is that a territory full of sane people arrived at a place with two overlapping governments.

Before it was all over, the people of Kansas would be given a choice between two Constitutions. One would allow people who already had slaves in Kansas to keep them, and those slaves’ children and their children’s children … forever and also allow people not yet in Kansas who wanted to bring slaves to Kansas to bring them. The second option would only allow the first of these two options. There was no third “no-slaves-at-all” option offered them. Thus, the new Constitution would guarantee the property rights of the people who owned Kansas’ present slaves and ergo, Kansas would become a slave State in either sooner or later. Lecompton embedded Dred Scott into the fabric of its Constitution and gave Kansas voters no chance to exclude it. "The right of property is before, and higher than any constitutional sanction,” the Constitution of Kansas now stated,

“and the right of an owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the same and is as inviolate as the right of the owner of any property whatever."

Just exactly how the State was planning to keep black babies and children from being smuggled in is beyond me. Sheer craziness.

But Buchanan insisted on accepting the Lecompton Constitution and by doing so, practically split his party in half. From Lecompton on, his ability to direct the decisions of the Northern portion of his party was practically destroyed. And with that constituency, he lost his ablest voice in the Legislature - indeed, perhaps the most talented politician in the country - Stephen Douglas. “Buchanan nevertheless went grimly ahead,” says Potter. And so the cable-snapping began to accelerate.

“For ten years, the Union had witnessed a constant succession of crises;” says Potter,

“always these ended in some kind of ‘victory’ for the South, each of which left the South with an empty prize and left the Union in a weaker condition than before.”

Chapter Thirteen: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Implications of Slavery

The story of the Lincoln Douglas debates is worth more time than I can alot to it here. Suffice it to say that I listened to all thirteen hours of the debates last week and found it so much more entertaining than contemporary Presidential debates. What I will highlight here is that Lincoln does manage to force Douglas into a bit of a corner in the Freeport debate when he compels Douglas to assert that a territory had a right to decline to support with its policing power the ability of a slave owner to maintain his right to slavery. (I suspect that Douglas was referring back to the Prigg decision here). But honestly, if a slave owner had a right to bring a slave to Kansas where he would only discover that Kansas had no mechanism to keep the slave a slave, why would he come in the first place and of what value was the right? Was Douglas returning to the Virginia-Kentucky resolutions or to Calhoun’s nullification doctrine again? Why couldn’t South Carolina then refuse to enforce Federal laws in South Carolina if it did not agree with them?

Douglas’ Freeport Doctrine essentially told southerners that they had rights that need not be enforced as it told Northerners that it had obligations that it need not fulfill; a Christmas present for everyone. But to what end? It simply inspired Southerners to push for Federal slave codes that would have to be enforced by Federal Marshalls (ironic given their State’s rights positions). How would this have been a workable solution? How would it not have eventually entitled a Northern controlled Federal government to send armies of law enforcement troops into the South to coerce them?

Lincoln insisted that America should return to its ideals rather than to its precedents in determining its future. These seems to me to be the better course. Aim at your ideals. Not your past practices.

“I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position—discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

Though he himself was not yet prepared to go the entire way toward racial equality, he did not believe that Douglas was giving the race credit for much of what it could do. Lincoln placed his own boundaries where blacks would not be allowed to marry whites, serve on juries, obtain citizenship or the right to vote in Illinois … in short, Lincoln would never survive as anything but a racist bigot in any contemporary election. He allowed himself to cater to convention. “A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded,” he said, “cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then, make them equals.” But he was sure that they deserved better than what Douglas was offering them. Even in 1862, a year into the war, Lincoln was trying to convince black people to emigrate and he was using the same arguments that Andrew Jackson had used to try and convince Cherokees that they should leave their homelands for Oklahoma. “Your race are suffering, in my judgment,” Lincoln said to a group of free blacks who came to the Whitehouse for a conference.

“the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.

I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.”

Basically, this is an argument that can be summarized “We are racist so you have to segregate yourselves from us for your own good.” Just what Jackson had told the Cherokees.

What is ironic is that Lincoln was just as good at catching the hypocrisies of Southerners as we are of catching him in his hypocrisies today. Note how adept he is at this sport in his Peoria Illinois Speech of 1854:

“Equal justice to the south, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the south yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? It is kindly provided that of all those who come into the world, only a small percentage are natural tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave States than in the free. The great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people, manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro. If they deny this, let me address them a few plain questions. In 1820 you joined the north, almost unanimously, in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death. Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.

Again, you have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the "SLAVE-DEALER." He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the "slave-dealer's children". If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave dealer you avoid the ceremony---instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

And yet again; there are in the United States and territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At $500 per head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars. How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves, and they would be slaves now, but for SOMETHING which has operated on their white owners, inducing them, at vast pecuniary sacrifices, to liberate them. What is that SOMETHING? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you, that the poor negro has some natural right to himself---that those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt and death.

And now, why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave? And estimate him only as the equal of the hog? Why ask us to do what you will not do yourselves? Why ask us to do for nothing, what two hundred millions of dollars could not induce you to do?”

Neither Lincoln nor Douglas were logically consistent. But Lincoln knew the general direction consistency was and was groping his way towards it. Lincoln was heading towards Freedom and equality. Douglas had lost his way and was pointing in the opposite direction at worst or, at best, pointing in several directions at once and saying, “It doesn’t matter.” Ironically, Southern fire-eaters would pick up on Lincoln’s challenge and start pushing for a re-opening of the slave trade with Africa as if to say, “No one is going to call us hypocrites.”

Chapter Fourteen: Harper’s Ferry: a Revolution That Failed.

It would be impossible to find a historian that did not believe that John Brown’s plan was hopelessly flawed from its inception. He was a complete failure as a military tactician. And yet, no one has ever denied that John Brown was a gifted martyr. He may not have known anything about how to lead an insurrection. But he knew how to die for a cause. Potter concludes that he had high standards but he did not know how to live up to them. His entire life backs up that assertion. He survived the marine assault on the Engine House at Harper’s Ferry by sheer accident and the South, by that one mistake, gave the North an opportunity to make a saint out of him. (I still wonder if Osama Bin Laden is still alive somewhere.)

“In his own mind, he was waiting for the slaves to rise,” Potter argues with a good deal of evidence, “But in reality, he was waiting for the slow moving forces of an organized society to get into motion and overwhelm him.”

“It was an article of faith among abolitionists that slaves of the South were seething with discontent and awaiting only a signal to throw off their chains,” Potter tells us. See page 373 for evidence of how pervasive this belief was. As it turned out, this memes was Brown’s fatal self-deception. They may not have wanted to be slaves. But they were not thinking with their brains set on “suicide.” John Brown massively miscalculated if he thought slaves in the area were going to run to the Engine house to get guns as soon as they heard he was handing them out. John Brown is someone who, in the words of Peter Senge, “made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.”

He would not be the first in this conflict to do so and pay dearly.

One might argue that the Union stood a chance of survival after John Brown, but not after John Brown’s beatification in the North afterwards. John Brown the insurrectionist in Harper’s Ferry scared people in Virginia. John Brown the martyr in Boston terrified them.

Chapter Fifteen: Southern Maneuvers on the Eve of Conflict

Douglas insists that States don’t have to pass slave codes to protect the rights of slave-owners in those states who have Federally guaranteed rights. Jefferson Davis responds by asking Congress for Federal slave codes to be enforced by Federal officers of the law in the territories - A simple counter-move. These requests would stand no chance of passing in a divided Congress but making people vote for or against them made for an excellent tool in sifting out Southern pro-slavery Democrats from Douglasite “pseudo-pro-slavery-Democrats” at the upcoming democratic convention.

This chapter looks at the proto-implosion of the Democratic Party as it begins to identify targets among its own members.

Chapter Sixteen: The Election of 1860

We start with the demolition of the Democratic party in Charleston.

“Many on both sides clung to an opportunistic notion that later on, some persons unknown, in some fashion unknown, would somehow patch up the split.”

Hadn’t someone (Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Douglas) always bailed them out in the past? This what happens when people begin to think they have guard rails. They drive faster than they should.

We continue with Lincoln’s nomination in Chicago. Potter argues that Lincoln was chosen, not so much because he best represented the core of the Republican party but because he represented the closest one could get to that core and still win in the crucial electoral college states of Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. So long as there was no one more anti-slavery running, the Republicans knew that they could depend on people who might not think Lincoln abolitionist enough ideally to vote for him practically. Lincoln was the first choice of few.He was the second choice of many, and eventually the choice that most accepted as “most likely to actually win.”

On page 431, Potter details the Republican illusions about secession and makes the case that for both North and South, previous experience had led them to believe that the other could be depended upon to be bluffing when it came right down to actually losing the Union. As the book plays out from here, this theme keeps re-emerging as Lincoln and the leaders of the secession movement approach each other in their massive game of Russian Roulette. Both sides were convinced that the other would blink first. Fort Sumter disabused them all of that fantasy.

“This total failure to perceive that the Union stood on the brink of dissolution was, in the words of Alan Nevins, the ‘cardinal error’ of the Republicans. Tactically, it was perhaps shrewd if not wise to pretend that there was no serious danger. Yet tactics did not require that they deceive themselves with their own pretense.”

The words of Robert Frost’s poem, Birches comes to mind when he talks about “truth breaking in.”

Chapter Seventeen: The Nature of Southern Separatism

The Union unravels at the very seams.

Potter notes that once President, the South understood that Lincoln would be in charge of all Federal offices in the North and South, including its judges, customs collectors, marshalls, and postmasters. They could, despite his promises, expect no help in their commitment to block out abolitionist literature in their mails or abolitionist agents and agitators in their slave populations. Worse, they would never be allowed to leave the South with their slaves.

Was there ever any hope that Lincoln would let them go? Given that he came from the Midwest where farmers absolutely needed to know that they had access to the Mississippi River and its port in New Orleans, that is not likely. Lincoln understood his geography enough to know that New Orleans controlled by a foreign power was “not an option.”

Potter’s explanation of the secession argument, found on page 479 and following is worth remembering and assigning. It outlines the Southern argument (and it is a strong one). One is tempted to say that the South, if we were to restrict the argument to precedents and interpretations of original intent, had the better arguments. But, as Potter notes, the Southern argument failed to take into consideration the realities of what eighty-seven years had constructed since that Constitution was framed. Regardless of what the framers had intended, Lincoln’s argument was based on present realities on the ground and the future of ideals. He was much less concerned with the dead framers than he was the present slaves and their owners. He was looking ahead. Not behind. And he planned to use his Constitutional powers accordingly.

Chapter Eighteen: The Lower South Secedes

Potter believes that the Secession movement in the Deep-South were emotionally driven and that pro-secessionists there took advantage of public panic and stoked it so that they could continue doing so. “It is hard to believe that this mood of apprehension would have continued,” Potter writes, “if the South had waited for Lincoln to come to office and been given a chance to show his whiggish moderation.”

It soon became clear that the Upper South was not panicked enough to join the seceding States though they were ideologically committed to the same belief in the right of secession. Though they were not prepared to secede upon the mere election of a Republican President, they would be betraying everything they held sacred if they did not come to the aid of a seceded Southern state were it to be attacked. Southern nationalism was not real enough to cause Virginia to leave the Union for losing an election, but if the President so elected chose to use force against South Carolina’s decision to create its own country, Virginia would certainly engage. As Robert Rhett expressed it, “the states of the Upper South … must be forced to choose . . . and then they will redeem themselves, but not before.”

And thus we begin to see the central place that Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor would most certainly play. The peace of Virginia, and of the whole union was at the disposal of South Carolina militias awaiting orders to fire on the Federal garrison in Charleston Harbor.

“If South Carolina should secede by herself, said Congressman William Boyce,

“then only two courses remain to our enemies. First, they must let us alone. Second, they must attempt to coerce us . . . Suppose they attempt to coerce us; then the Southern States are compelled to make common cause with us, and we wake up some morning and find the flag of a Southern Confederacy floating over us.”

The next chapter deals with the intricate maneuverings between President Buchanan and the Southern Secession movement.

Chapter Nineteen: Winter Crisis

President James Buchannan’s Constitutional mind led him to a perhaps correct and yet perhaps ridiculous conclusion. He asserted that the Constitution did not give a southern state the right to secede from the Union. But then he asserted that the Constitution did not give the Federal government the right to coerce that same state if it did so. “Seldom,” declared a Cincinnati editor, “have we known so strong an argument come to so lame and impotent conclusion.” He did hold that it would be his duty to see to it that the laws of the United States were obeyed in States that he was not constitutionally permitted to coerce however and in that slight thread of union, he managed to summon up the gumption to keep holding the forts of Charleston harbor. Other than that however, he was about the lamest duck ever to live in the Whitehouse months after it would have been best for him to have departed.

At this point in time, it seems obvious that the country was sliding into war on the strength of two powerful memes. In the Republican party it was the notion that the South was merely bluffing to get what the last election had deprived them of. In the seceding States, it was that Abraham Lincoln, when actually faced with a manly resistance, would fold up, and let the South go. In the months before his inauguration, Lincoln had no power and chose to let his former campaign speeches speak for him. This hardly felt scary to a euphoric South in the midst of frantic and furious action. The South had actual control of insufficient power. The North had little control over superior power and it was gaining, in the secession movement “a second cause” to bolster its resolve should the bullets start to fly. They would have reason to believe that they were not simply fighting against slavery. They would be fighting against treason. Both North and South had reason to be over-confident. It was a recipe for impending doom.

And it was in this moment of the crisis that Buchanan’s cabinet began to implode as various Southern members resigned and began to pack their offices and head South for new roles in a new government.

And quietly, on the night of Dec 26, Robert Anderson spiked the guns of Fort Moultrie and moved his entire commend to the more defensible island fortress of Fort Sumter making what was perhaps the most important decision of any one man in the entire crisis. Controlling that one small piece of real estate would mean that the South would eventually have to fire the first shots of the war. In time, Lincoln would be able to maneuver South Carolina into starting the war. He could only hope that this technicality would allow Virginia to stay out of it.

His hopes proved to be unfounded.

Chapter Twenty: Fort Sumter: End and Beginning

If you have ever wondered why Lincoln did not just “let them go.”

“In his militant attitude towards the session, Lincoln reflected the strong feelings of a region as well as a party. For people living in the upper Mississippi Valley, disunion presented the special threat of closing off their access to the sea. Railroad construction had reduced but by no means eliminated their dependence on the river commerce, and in any case, the need for untrammeled passage was partly psychological. The very thought of returning to the days when a foreign authority controlled the mouth of the mighty stream inspired kind of claustrophobic alarm and much belligerent outcry. “There can be no doubt,” a Milwaukee editor warned, ‘that any forcible obstruction of the Mississippi would lead to a war between the West in the South.’ ‘The people of the northwest,’ said the Chicago Tribune, ‘would never negotiate with anyone for free navigation of the river. It is their right, and they will assert it for the extremity of blotting Louisiana off of the map.’ These and similar threats, issuing from Democrats as well as Republicans, served to remind Americans that there were many places besides Fort Sumter where the friction of disunion could provide the spark for Civil War.”

Would Lincoln have accepted a promise by the South that they would never obstruct the use of the Mississippi River to Northerners? Probably about as readily as the South was willing to accept Lincoln’s promise that he would not emancipate their slaves. One can easily imagine a scenario where the South made the use of the Mississippi River contingent upon Northerners dutifully handing back all their escaped fugitive slaves. Fort Sumter or no Fort Sumter, this war was, by this time, inevitable it would appear to me.

Excellent book.

It makes me think that it would be entertaining to teach a class on the mental mistakes that led to the Civil War.

John Brown: Assume that your beliefs, if repeated with enough frequency and passion will make them actual.

Stephen Douglas: Assume that policies will not lead to significant alterations in behavior; alterations which will most likely render the very same policies unworkable.

Abraham Lincoln: Assume that your ability to see the hypocrisy in others’ positions protects you from being a hypocrite yourself.

James Polk: Assume that people are so blind that you can promise them a fair deal and give them a raw deal and they won’t notice it.

Fire-Eaters: Don’t assume that someone who does not use their superior power immediately doesn’t have it.

James Buchanan: Survival is the highest law. If you need a power to survive, let the historians debate about whether or not it is Constitutional.

John Calhoun: Despite appearances, a human being cannot be turned into a toaster or a piece of furniture. Pigs cannot be armed with Sharps rifles. Men of color can.

David Wilmott: Being anti-Slavery is not the same thing as being pro-highest potential. Don’t let the good be the enemy of the best.

Question for Comment: Why is the History of the Civil War so compellingly interesting?

12/07/2014

In December of 1859, President James Buchanan (A Pennsylvanian with Southern sympathies) responded to the John Brown raid in his State of the Union Address by warning the nation to calm itself down and back off its irresponsible use of wild-eyed and inflammatory rhetoric (his address was primarily aimed at the North). “Whilst it is the duty of the President” he said,

"from time to time to give to Congress information of the state of the Union, I shall not refer in detail to the recent sad and bloody occurrences at Harpers Ferry. Still, it is proper to observe that these events, however bad and cruel in themselves, derive their chief importance from the apprehension that they are but symptoms of an incurable disease in the public mind, which may break out in still more dangerous outrages and terminate at last in an open war by the North to abolish slavery in the South. . . . In this view, let me implore my countrymen, North and South, to cultivate the ancient feelings of mutual forbearance and good will toward each other and strive to allay the demon spirit of sectional hatred and strife now alive in the land.”

And then, Buchanan immediately commenced to praise the Supreme Court’s recent Dred Scott decision that forever placed the name of “property” on all the South’s slaves and opened up the floodgates of slave system expansion into the new territories.

“I cordially congratulate you upon the final settlement by the Supreme Court of the United States of the question of slavery in the Territories, which had presented an aspect so truly formidable at the commencement of my Administration. The right has been established of every citizen to take his property of any kind, including slaves, into the common Territories belonging equally to all the States of the Confederacy, and to have it protected there under the Federal Constitution. Neither Congress nor a Territorial legislature nor any human power has any authority to annul or impair this vested right. The supreme judicial tribunal of the country, which is a coordinate branch of the Government, has sanctioned and affirmed these principles of constitutional law, so manifestly just in themselves and so well calculated to promote peace and harmony among the States. It is a striking proof of the sense of justice which is inherent in our people that the property in slaves has never been disturbed, to my knowledge, in any of the Territories.”

If he thought that the Dred Scott case was going to resolve the conflict – If he thought that a Federal court decision defining slaves as property was going to calm the waters - he was sadly mistaken. It only sent a message to the North that the central government was planning to open up all territories and states to slave-holders. The Dred Scott decision would be the wedge that Republican Abraham Lincoln, with the help of Democrat Stephen Douglas, would use to split Buchanan’s Democratic Party in half as Southern Democrats were for actually enforcing the court decision and Northern Democrats, following Douglas, were opposed to doing so, arguing that the States could simply refuse to police slave codes and thus dissuade those with slaves and abstract rights from moving to unwelcome States and territories to assert those rights.

Thomas Fleming’s book is somewhat misnamed in that he believes that the Civil War was caused by TWO diseases of the Public mind, not one. In the South, the disease of the public mind was incubated in Santo Domingo’s violent slave uprising (1791-1804) and transferred to the United States through Thomas Jefferson’s influential Notes on the State of Virginia.

Jefferson spelled out the fearful future he dreaded. “Considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events,” he says of potential insurrection. He writes of his fears of Santo Domingo like outbreak of violence in the American South.

“.... It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Jefferson’s mind “disease,” involved not being able to understand what it was like to be in the position of the slave. He pretended that things were other than they were. “Their grief’s are transient,” he said of slave feelings.

“Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

He can only hope for a gradual emancipation that his other writings may have made impossible.

“I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.” – Jefferson’s notes on the State of Virginia

Jefferson hints here that American slavery has the potential to erupt into a slave war and this is something that causes him to favor slavery even when he thinks it immoral. This is the source of his famous proverb about having the wolf by the ears, unable to hang on or let go. And thus, resentments would be allowed to build – in the slaves themselves, in northern abolitionists who saw in Southern inability to empathize with slaves an evil needing divine judgment, and in Southernors who resented abolitionist apparent lack of concern for the safety of their families. One is reminded of Langston Hughes’ poem A Dream Deferred.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Fleming argues that Southern fears of violent slave insurrection were behind much of why they did what they did in the years leading up to the Civil War. Southerners like James Madison had argued that slaves needed to be emancipated only upon condition of removal back to Africa for precisely this reason. In time, Madison had convinced Jefferson that the only solution to the problem was “diffusion” - a public policy of expanding slavery to the territories so that slave density in the South could be reduced. Slavery in and of itself was not good but too many slaves in too constricted an area was deadly.

This belief that white slave owners in the South had that they could not free their slaves without violent consequence to themselves, their wives, and their children – combined with the belief that the solution was only to be found in slavery’s expansion made that expansion into the territories a “survival issue” for white Southerners. For them, a policy such as the one David Wilmott or Abraham Lincoln were proposing, a policy of restricting the American West to white people, was a recipe for violence in the South. If white people could leave the South and slaves could not, the demographic shift would simply favor the African American slave population numbers to the point where white Southerners could no longer muster up enough threatened violence to repress their slaves’ assumed violent tendencies. Their slaves, congregated in high enough densities, were not capable of being both free and non-violent in the Southern strain of “public mind disease” Flemming argues.

But Fleming’s more controversial argument lies with the disease he diagnoses in the Northern mind. There, he says, the disease was a certain strain of uncompromising South-hating abolitionism that could not place itself in the shoes of white Southerners – that saw them all as brutal, violent, rapacious, layabouts. For Flemming, the sort of abolitionism exhibited by the likes of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld – the sort of abolitionism that might see a violent slave insurrection like that of Nat Turner’s in the early 1830’s and say something like “serves em right” – was equally “a disease of mind.”

Whites in the South could not understand what it might be like to be a slave. Abolitionists in the North could not understand what it might be like to live in a world of resentful and perhaps vengeful slaves. With the end of the Revolutionary War, we begin to see softening in the hearts and minds of the founders. George Washington, in the following words, written in his will months before his death, expressed his willingness to risk slave emancipation.

“ . . . is my Will and desire, that all the slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. . . . And I do hereby expressly forbid the sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretense whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay, after the Crops which may then be on the ground are harvested, particularly as it respects the aged & infirm.” - George Washgington’s will.

[Note that Washington is still being “pragmatic” in insisting that they not be freed until the crops are in.]

With the invention of the cotton gin however, profit began overwhelming principle. Cotton was nature’s way of making you rich and slaves were how you picked it. Those with slaves saw that they could make money by selling their slaves’ offspring to the plantations springing up in Mississippi and Texas, etc. and the growth in the slave population thus accelerated. Restricting their habitat to the old south was what Jefferson would begin to call a “pseudo-morality” as it would essentially lead to a Santo Domingo-like massacre. Jefferson refers to abolitionism in a letter to John Adams as “freedom and a dagger.” When Jefferson sees just how resistant Northerners are to having slave populations in the West (during the Missouri Statehood conflict), he turns a dark shade of despairing.

"But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." - Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, (discussing slavery and the Missouri question), Monticello, 22 April 1820.

In the 1820’s and 1830’s white Southerners were feeling the absolute need to expand slavery just as Northern abolitionists were seeing the absolute need to get rid of it. “Let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote in his first edition of The Liberator,

“ . . . I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -- but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

Garrison had an almost total lack of empathy for victims of slave insurrections, Flemming notes. Garrison called for sympathy for slaves but he refused to consider the possibility of compensating slave holders as the British had done when they rid the West Indies of slavery. For Garrison, compassionate feeling forslaves could not co-exist with compassionate feelings for slave-holders. These were mutually exclusive feelings. To care for one (slaves) was to hate the other (slave-holders).

And this is where the author insists that a disease infected the Northern mind. We begin to see people in the North give themselves permission to hate people in the South, not simply disagree with them. And – no surprise here – Southerners hate them back.

I could write pages about Thomas Flemming’s coverage of the abolition movement and how it eventually turned Southern sympathies (even among those disposed to want to rid themselves of slavery) against all abolitionist sentiments. Ultimately, the South grew tired of being called a bunch of murdering rapist by the likes of Garrison and Weld and Stowe and in time, even Lincoln. Flemming’s account of Lincoln’s offer of command to Robert E. Lee and Lee’s refusal is poignant. He makes it clear that Northern and Southern “poisons” had done their work in the mind of a Southerner who might have done something about the problem could he have but worked hand in hand with someone like Lincoln.

Flemming holds up Lincoln as the sort of abolitionist that the country needed - the sort that might have averted the Civil war had it not been for people like John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld.

Lincoln, he argues, had the capacity for deeply empathizing with the slave while holding onto the contradictory empathy he felt for southerners, caught in the web of a system they did not create. Here is Lincoln speaking to the concerns of multiple sides in one of his arguments during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.

“I hate [indifference to slavery] because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty-criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South. Doubtless there are individuals on both sides, who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North, and become tiptop Abolitionists; while some Northern ones go South, and become most cruel slave-masters.

When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. . . . I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.

When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave-trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbid the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter."

Lincoln is not a first stone thrower. Somehow, Lincoln had managed to retain a sympathy for multiple sides of this issue. This is something that few people, North or South could manage. It is perhaps what makes a great soul. In one of Lincoln’s last appearances before his assassination, he asked a band that had solicited a request from him to play “Dixie.” In his second inaugural, he pled with both sides to care for the other’s orphans and widows. He asks everyone, himself included, to set aside judgmentalism and malice. As Flemming puts it,

“Lincoln had rescued the noble side of the abolitionists crusade - their hatred of slavery- and separated it from its ruinous side – their hatred of Southern white men. That left him free to deal with the defeated South on his terms.”

In contrast, the famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, when permitted to offer a sermon at Fort Sumter after the war, cannot seem to help but revel in a bath of theological victory; As if to say, “We won because we were on God’s side. We were on God’s side. You weren’t.”

It is hard to see Lincoln’s “malice towards none” in his words.

“Once, and but once, has treason dishonored it [the American flag that had been taken down when the fort surrendered]. In that insane hour when the guiltiest and bloodiest rebellion of time hurled their fires upon the fort, you, Sir, [turning to Gen. ANDERSON,] and a small heroic band stood within these now crumbled walls and did gallant and just battle for the honor and defence of the nation's banner. [Applause.]

What scenes have filled this air and disturbed these waters! These shattered heaps of shapeless stones are all that is left of Fort Sumter. Desolation broods in yonder sad city [Charleston]. Solemn retribution hath avenged our dishonored banner. You have come back with honor who departed hence four years ago, leaving the air sultry with fanaticism. The surging crowds that rolled up their frenzied shouts as the flag came down are dead, or scattered, or silent, and their habitations are desolate. Ruin sits in the cradle of treason, rebellion has perished, but there flies the same flag that was insulted. [Great and prolonged applause.] With starry eyes it looks all over this bay for that banner that supplanted it and sees it not. [Applause.] You that then for the day were humbled, are here again to triumph once and forever. [Applause.] In the storms of that assault this glorious ensign was often struck, but it is a memorable fact not one of its stars was torn out by shot or shell. [Applause.] It was a prophecy. It said, not one State shall be struck from this nation by treason. [Applause.]

The fulfillment is at hand. Lifted to the air to-day it proclaims, after four years of war, not a State is blotted out. [Applause.] Hail to the flag of our fathers and our flag; glory to the banner that has gone through four years, black with tempests of war, to pilot the nation back to peace without dismemberment; and glory be to God who, above all hosts and banners, hath ordained victory and shall ordain peace. [Applause.]

Wherefore have we come hither pilgrims from distant places? Are we come to exult that Northern hands are stronger than Southern? No! but to rejoice that the hands of those who defend a just and beneficent government are mightier than the hands that assaulted it. [Loud applause.] Do we exult over fallen cities? We exult that a nation has not fallen. [Applause.] We sorrow with the sorrowful, we sympathize with the desolate, we look upon this shattered fort and yonder dilapidated city with sad eyes, grieved that men should have committed such treason, and glad that God had set such a mark upon treason, that all ages shall dread and abhor it. [Applause.] We exult, not for a passion gratified, but for a sentiment victorious; not for temper, but for conscience; not, as we devoutly believe, that our will is done, but that God's will hath been done. We should be unworthy of that liberty intrusted to our care, if, on such a day as this, we sullied our hearts by feelings of aimless vengeance, and equally unworthy if we did not devoutly thank Him who hath said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," that he hath put a mark upon arrogant rebellion ineffaceable while time lasts. Since this flag went down, on that dark day, who shall tell the mighty woes that have made this land a spectacle to angels and men!

. . . This is the flag of sovereignty. The nation, not the States, is sovereign restored to authority. This flag commands not supplicates. There may be pardon, but no concession. [Great applause.] There may be amnesty and oblivion, but no honied compromises. [Applause.] The nation to-day has peace for the peaceful, and war for the turbulent. [Applause.] The only condition of submission is to submit. There is the constitution, there are the laws, there is the government. They rise up like mountains of strength that shall not be moved. They are the conditions of peace. One nation under one government, without slavery' has been ordained and shall stand. There can be peace on no other basis”

I suspect that Fleming would argue that with the death of Lincoln, the diseases of the public mind that caused the war returned with a vengeance. Southerners returned to their convictions about the need to repress their former slaves. Northerners returned to their convictions about humbling the South. And Civil War light was on.

Question for Comment: What is the secret of empathizing with victims and yet not coming to hate the victimizers? How does one learn to love and yet not hate those who do not love?